De la serie mujer montaña: cuerpos celestes y terrestres

Since the beginning of her career, Luz Lizarazo (b. Bogotá, Colombia, 1966) has explored the poetic, political, and spiritual significance of the female form in drawings, watercolours, paintings, sculptures, embroidery and installations. Her materials range from traditional sculptural elements like wood, ceramics and glass to natural fibres such as wool and human hair.

In her 2026 series, Mujer Montaña [Mountain Woman], Lizarazo integrates the female body into the landscape, merging its contours with the outlines of mountains, volcanoes, hills, and rivers and depicting women in a variety of physical positions which echo these forms. Elsewhere women are portrayed with bellies pregnant with the night sky or sun. Lizarazo’s formal convergence of woman and landscape is expressed in titles such as Woman Volcano, Woman Hill, Abyss Woman, and Woman Plateau.

Cuerpos celeste y terrestres shows a constellation of women and female organs encircling the cosmos, inverting the conventional understanding of the cosmos as being the container of all things by making it the contents of a container made by women. By connecting the female form with the infinite form of the universe, the work draws on the archetype of the cosmic woman, and considers ideas present within mythologies that have inspired the artist which associate women with the origins of time and space.

The connection Lizarazo makes between the female form and the cosmos extends the artist’s longstanding interest in the spiritual threshold between inner and outer space, whilst providing a striking visual contrast with the lived experience of women on earth. As the artist has noted, “the female form has been considered a way to celebrate life, birth, transitions, and death. It has also been treated as a weapon of war, a sexual object and a site for abuse, a part of an infinite list of territories upon which forces ranging from the political, to the social or the religious have exerted their power.” Against this history, which remains as present as ever, Lizarazo’s celestial image casts a revealing light on women’s worldly realities.

- Elsa Gray